[Discuss] SanDisk Extreme SSDs keep abruptly failing—firmware fix for only some promised | Ars Technica

[Edward]

I've been testing (?) two external SSD's, one is a Samsung T7 500GB, the other is an 'onn' (Walmart's electronics house brand) 250GB and the trouble I've been having, is just getting Linux installed to them, without ending up with a grub rescue> prompt referencing 'normal.mod not found'.

The host desktops are older, BIOS systems with USB 2.0 ports in front and am wondering whether the installers are actually thinking they're installing to UEFI systems instead. Within the past week, I tried seven different distros (both big and small) and managed to get Debian Bullseye (11) installed on the Samsung and Fedora Rawhide (currently the development branch for Fedora 39) on the 'onn'. 

Fedora mostly does not boot with the 'git' kernels currently supplied, but it boots fine with the only non-git kernel. The git kernels feature video corruption at the bottom of the screen, with kernel-core and kwin_wayland crash reports ready to submit, if I reboot with the non-git kernel. KDE desktop.

Strangely, I could not get Kubuntu installed to either SSD due to the same 'normal.mod not found' issue, but it successfully installed to a SanDisk Cruzer Glide thumb drive and runs from it.

The Samsung has a blue LED on it which blinks when there is activity and is solid blue when there is none. After a typical Linux installation finished and the screen directs to reboot into the new system, the LED on the Samsung continued to blink for as much as 20 minutes after. I know there is a speed difference between USB 2.0 and 3.0, but 20 minutes seems like a lot. The only installation where its LED stopped blinking immediately after the installer finished, was Debian.

Loading in the kernel from either SSD or the thumb drive, is the slowest part. Once it's in and the bootsplash appears, it's fast from that point.

The install method: 

	/ as the mount point, with the 'boot' flag set, using the btrfs file system.


On Thursday 25 May 2023 03:15:39 PM (-04:00), Bill Bogstad wrote:

> On Fri, May 19, 2023 at 7:23 PM Edward  wrote:
> >
> > Looks like SanDisk's Extreme SSD's are having issues.
> >
> > https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/sandisk-extreme-ssds-keep-abruptly-failing-firmware-fix-for-only-some-promised/
> 
> Personally, I would just stay away from purpose-built external SSDs.
> The prices of 2.5 or even m.2 SSDs have come down so much
> that I would suggest doing a reverse "drive shucking".   Buy an
> internal drive with known good capabilities and pair it with a cheap
> ($10-$15)
> dollar external case.   You can even get m.2 NVME to USB external
> cases pretty cheaply.   I upgraded the 512GB NVME drive in my laptop
> recently
> and put it in an external case.   My minimal testing is that it can
> pretty much saturate the USB-C connection.   512GB isn't really enough
> for a good external backup drive, but it is probably going to be a
> crazy fast/big Ventoy based boot anything that I want device.
> 
> If I still had anything that had a rust based internal boot drive, it
> might be interesting to see if booting from the external SSD would be
> faster.
> Bandwidth over USB 3.0+ vs. real world SATA is probably comparable.
> The lack of seeking in the SSD, would probably make the
> external drive faster even when "slowed down" by USB.
> 
> Bill Bogstad